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Non Gaming Discussions => Off-Topic => Topic started by: fastson on January 19, 2008, 07:41:37 AM

Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: fastson on January 19, 2008, 07:41:37 AM
My Gawgle skills are not as advanced as I thunk.

Can someone guide me through how to disable harddrive parking in Windows XP? I\'ve read that frequent parking of the HDD by the OS can shorten the HDDs life.
I remember a few months ago about there being a bug in Ubuntu which caused the OS to park the harddrive after just a few seconds of inactivity, I\'ve noticed that my WinXP laptop parks the HDD after a few mins of inactivity but I wish to turn it off completely since I\'m at no risk of running out of juice anyway.
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: Paul2 on January 19, 2008, 09:43:47 AM
what is parking harddrive?  that\'s the first time i heard of it.
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: fastson on January 19, 2008, 11:58:50 AM
Quote from: Paul2
what is parking harddrive?  that\'s the first time i heard of it.


In Ubuntu at least it would park the read/write head of the HDD (like it does when it shuts down), basically shutting the thing down, you can hear it "click". I can hear the same click during WinXP.

Based on what they said in the Ubuntu-threads, HDDs are only rated for a certain amount of parkings, so Ubuntus frequent parking bug would kill off harddrives early if left unchecked.

It was an easy fix in Ubuntu, just a few terminal commands to alter how power management works etc, but I havent found anything in the power saving options under WinXp.
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: Samwise on January 19, 2008, 12:03:06 PM
Can\'t you just look in the control panel, there are some power management features there. I guess what you don\'t want is the powering down of the harddrive after a certain amount of time? I don\'t think that\'s turned on by default though - at least I\'ve never encountered it.

EDIT: Doh, you already said you had looked there.
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: macabre on January 19, 2008, 03:39:31 PM
The option "turn off hdd" is right below the setting for the monitor power saving. At least in my version (Pro). It is set to "never" by default.
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: fastson on January 19, 2008, 05:50:45 PM
Yes I have that set to "Never" but the HDD still clicks after a few minutes of inactivity, even if the notebook is hooked up to the wall for juice.

Oh well, 3 year warranty. If anything happens to this bitch I get a new HDD. :P
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: §ôµÏG®ïñD on January 19, 2008, 09:21:10 PM
it\'s a fault as far as i know, not enough power for the drive.. i\'ll look into it and get back to you.
Title: Disable harddrive parking in Win XP?
Post by: fastson on January 20, 2008, 04:24:33 AM
Quote from: §ôµÏG®ïñD
it\'s a fault as far as i know, not enough power for the drive.. i\'ll look into it and get back to you.


Great, thanks. :)